Market adoption of wireless LAN (WLAN) technology has exploded, as users from a wide range of backgrounds and vertical industries have brought this technology into their homes, offices, and increasingly into the public air space. This inflection point has highlighted not only the limitations of earlier-generation systems, but also the changing role that WLAN technology now plays in people's work and lifestyles, across the globe. Indeed, WLANs are rapidly changing from convenience networks to business-critical networks. Increasingly users are depending on WLANs to improve the timeliness and productivity of their communications and applications, and in doing so, require greater visibility, security, management, and performance from their network.
For some applications, it is desirable to provide location information to the wireless clients. Some wireless infrastructures may provide the MAC address of a wireless access point or a basic service set identification (BSSID), as a coarse-grained proxy for the actual location, to the client during an initial association between the wireless access point and the wireless client. However, such systems do not provide location information about the wireless client. The IEEE 802.11k standard defines a mechanism for a wireless client to request its location from the wireless infrastructure. This location is generally defined in location configuration information (LCI) (e.g., latitude/longitude). The IEEE 802.11k standard does not support, however, location based services that support more than one location service type.